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Guiana dreams
By Nicholas Laughlin
First
published in the catalogue for Paramaribo SPAN, an exhibition of works by contemporary
Surinamese and Dutch artists at various locations in Paramaribo,
26 February to 14 March, 2010
i
“When we begin to fix our eyes on geographical maps, and to
read the narratives of navigators, we feel for certain countries and
climates a
sort of predilection, which we know not how to account for....”
Alexander von Humboldt,
Personal Narrative
of Travels to the Equinoctial Region
of the New Continent,
During the Years 1799 to 1804
Novus Orbis, the New
World, is no newer than the Old. When Columbus decided he’d arrived in
the
Indies, he was twelve thousand miles off his mark. America was so
dubbed by a
German cartographer misled by a forged letter. Antillia, an imaginary
island of
seven cities, lent its name to the archipelago that divides the warmer
Caribbean Sea from the colder Atlantic.
Geography is not merely a
collection of facts and statistics: the heights of mountains and
lengths of
rivers and fathoms of the sea. It is also a fabric of wishes and hopes,
lies
and misunderstandings, metaphors and fictions: dreams of Northwest
Passages and
Shangri-Las, lost cities and fountains of youth, Edens and Hells on
earth.
Here is a geographical assertion
that is part metaphor, part hope: that the region of South America
through
which flow the rivers Essequibo, Demerara, Corentyne, Saramacca,
Suriname,
Maroni, Cayenne, and Approuague is somehow part of the Caribbean, which
is
otherwise composed of islands.
Here is another: that this
shoulder of the continent is itself a sort of island, whose bounding
waters are
the Atlantic, the Orinoco, and the Amazon and its tributaries. The
million
square miles thus insulated by rivers from the rest of South America
are
sometimes called the island of Guiana.
Today this region of mountains,
rivers, forests, and savannahs is divided among Venezuela to the west,
Brazil
to the south and east, and the three territories once known as British,
Dutch,
and French Guiana — now independent Guyana and Suriname, and the French
département
d’outre-mer of
Guyane.
For journalists sent
here to scribble a colour piece for a metropolitan magazine, the
checklist of
clichés includes some kind of joke about these peculiar and
unrecognisable
names. [1] Guiana — I use the old
spelling with an i to distinguish the
whole region — has drifted to the
fringes of the world’s attention. But these million square miles
between the
Amazon and the Orinoco were bitterly coveted and contested in earlier
centuries
of the colonial enterprise, and the metaphors and fictions born here in
the
fevered minds of European adventurers stubbornly persist in the
cultural
imagination of the Western world.
To its first European visitors,
Guiana represented the possibility of (literally) fabulous wealth. In
the early
decades of the sixteenth century, a legend spread among the
conquistadors of a
city of gold somewhere in the terra
incognita
between the Andes and the Atlantic. One expedition after another set
out in search of El Dorado, only to end in disappointment or death. By
the end
of the century the legend reached the ears of Walter Ralegh in London.
In 1595
he sailed across the Atlantic and into the Orinoco delta. He explored
for a
mere six weeks and went no further than 150 miles upriver. Treasure
eluded him;
fancy did not. His account of this journey, The Discovery of the Large,
Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana
(1596), borrowed liberally from other travellers’ tales, and lyrically
described wonders which Ralegh never saw: mountains of crystal, a huge
waterfall with the roar of a thousand bells. Equal parts real estate
prospectus,
adventure journal, and personal apologia, the Discovery did more than any
other written account to fix the
dream of El Dorado in the world’s consciousness.
This was “the most beautiful
country that ever mine eyes beheld,” Ralegh wrote. “Plains of twenty
miles in
length, the grass short and green, and in divers parts groves of trees
by
themselves, as if they had been by all the art and labour in the world
so made
of purpose ... the deer came down feeding by the water’s side as if
they had
been used to a keeper’s call.” And this park-like paradise was waiting
to be
possessed. “Guiana is a country that hath yet her maidenhead,” Ralegh
concluded. He was just the suitor to deflower her, should the right
investor
put up funds to pay for ships, supplies, and men.
This vision of fertility — of a
promised land of fruit ripe for plucking — encouraged efforts by the
English
and the Dutch to settle the Guiana coast in the seventeenth century.
Images of
tropical bounty were rendered on canvas by artists like Frans Post —
who spent
eight years (1636 to 1644) in what was then Dutch Brazil, the region
around
Recife — and Dirk Valkenburg, who travelled to Suriname in 1706, where
he
painted landscapes and genre scenes like slave dances. These artists
found an
eager market for their depictions of the exotic among the prosperous
middle
class of the Netherlands. For a wealthy merchant in Amsterdam, a
Suriname
landscape on his parlour wall signalled a trendy curiosity about the
world’s
frontiers, and perhaps at the same time pointed to one of the sources
of his
fortune.
But these lush scenes had their
sinister side. Equatorial forests, picturesque in a gilded frame, were
in fact
oppressively hot and humid, full of ensnaring and poisonous vegetation,
strange
noises, and carnivorous creatures of all sizes — not to mention hostile
natives, liable to assert their presence with a shower of poisoned
arrows.
Early explorers’ accounts of the Guianas and the Amazon basin are
narratives of
anxiety and hunger. Into the “green hell” of the jungle countless white
men
disappeared without a trace, a titillating idea which has inspired
scores of
novels and Hollywood movies.
The most pervasively influential
of these adventure fictions must be Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Lost
World
(1912), which lent its name to a
whole subgenre. “Lost world” stories share a classic formula: a remote
location
in the tropics, whether secret valley, island, or mountaintop; a band
of
intrepid adventurers, with some perilous mission; the discovery of a
forgotten
civilisation, a primitive race, or bloodthirsty monsters; and some form
of
treasure for a heroes’ reward. In Conan Doyle’s original, the eccentric
Professor Challenger leads an expedition to an uncharted mountain in
South
America, which proves to host dinosaurs that have mysteriously survived
the
aeons, ape-men who must be beaten into submission, and massive diamonds.
The Lost World’s plot elements recur
in books and films ranging from
Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Land
that Time Forgot (1924) to King Kong (1933) to Michael
Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990) and the
herpetophobic Anaconda (1997). But Conan
Doyle’s narrative was itself
indebted to the reports of Everard im Thurn, the British explorer who
in 1884
led the first known ascent of “unclimbable” Roraima, the flat-topped
mountain
where the borders of Venezuela, Brazil, and then-British Guiana
converge. News
of this conquest, telegraphed from Georgetown, was an international
press
sensation.
Scientific reports and adventure
tales alike helped establish another enduring trope: the Guiana region
— and
wider tropical America — as a setting for quests and journeys through
hardship
and hazard. Sometimes the challenge is undertaken on behalf of monarch
or
nation or science. The ostensible objective may be some distant
location — lost
city, river source — a new species, or the thrill of danger itself. But
the
underlying purpose is to demonstrate mastery, whether of savage nature,
savage
Indians, or the adventurer’s own fears. The forays of the early
conquistadors —
Francisco de Orellana, Lope de Aguirre — belong to this tradition. So
too, in
his way, does Alexander von Humboldt, who recorded his five-year
circuit
through northern South America in the monumental thirty-volume Personal
Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent (1807–1833), a key
text in the history of botany,
geology, and meteorology. In emulation, a generation of
naturalist-explorers
fanned out across the Neotropics laden with the instruments required
for
“Humboldtian” empirical observation.
King-and-country ideals did not
motivate the half-Scottish, half-Dutch John Gabriel Stedman, who
arrived in
Suriname in 1773 to fight a guerilla war. A career soldier who
re-enlisted to
help cover family debts, Stedman was dispatched to subjugate the
insurgent
Maroons of the colony’s eastern district. He lasted five years, engaged
in
seven separate campaigns, and observed firsthand the brutal punishments
inflicted on enslaved Africans. Back in Europe, he turned his journal
into The
Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of
Surinam.
Published in 1796 by a London radical, Stedman’s Narrative was seized upon by
British abolitionists as a
document of the atrocities of plantation slavery. It was a best-seller.
In his opening pages, Stedman
reports his dismay at the sight of a young enslaved woman with her skin
in
shreds. “The crime which had been committed by this miserable victim of
tyranny,” he wrote, “was the non-performance of a task to which she was
apparently unequal, for which she was sentenced to receive two hundred
lashes.”
Later chapters describe whippings, hangings, mutilations, and a slave
suspended
by a hook through his ribs from a gallows. William Blake’s illustration
of this
last enormity became one of most horribly familiar visual
representations of
New World slavery. [2]
But the devious cruelty of Suriname planters was a
commonplace decades before Stedman, even satirised by Voltaire in Candide (1759).
The idea of the Guiana region as
a place of suffering, a heart of darkness, thrived long after the end
of
slavery. The Dreyfus Affair, the political scandal which exploded in
Paris in
1894 after the unjust treason conviction of a Jewish army officer, cast
a
searching light on the penal camps of French Guiana. Alfred Dreyfus’s
sufferings on Devil’s Island were detailed by an avid press.
Journalists
continued to report on unspeakable conditions in the bagne — malnutrition,
disease, backbreaking labour — until
the camps were shut down after the Second World War.
Then in 1978 came the event that
has most indelibly coloured contemporary awareness of this part of the
world:
the Jonestown massacre. The deaths of over nine hundred men, women, and
children in the forest of northwest Guyana were the last chapter of a
story
that began in the United States, where the self-proclaimed prophet Jim
Jones
founded his Peoples Temple cult on a doctrine of socialism, perverted
by
megalomania. Like others before him, Jones saw Guyana as virgin
territory, a
building-site for his own tropical utopia. The nightmarish collapse of
Jonestown into mass suicide and murder was an American story more than
a
Guyanese one, but it reinforced the idea of Guyana — or Guiana — as one
of the
dark places of the earth.
Paradoxically, Guiana has also been
imagined as a place of primal innocence and timeless wisdom, portrayed
through
its indigenous peoples, and latterly through the Maroons of Suriname
and
Guyane. Ralegh “marvelled” to find men of “gravity and judgment” among
the
Amerindians of the Orinoco, “that had no help of learning nor breed.”
Michel de
Montaigne’s famous essay “Of Cannibals” (1580) favourably contrasts the
indigenous “nations” of South America, “still very close to their
original
naturalness ... in such a state of purity,” with contemporary Europe,
racked
by wars of religion. The title character of Oroonoko (1688), the novel by
the English writer Aphra Behn,
is an African prince deceived into slavery and shipped to Suriname.
“The most
illustrious courts could not have produced a braver man,” Behn
declares, “both
for greatness of courage and mind, a judgment more solid, a wit more
quick.”
Oroonoko dies horrifically, dismembered by order of the English
governor, after
he leads a slave revolt. Thomas Southerne’s stage adaptation, first
performed
in 1695, remained popular with audiences into Victorian times,
promoting the
idea of the “noble savage”. [3]
This notion of peoples “close to
their original naturalness” — uncorrupted by modern civilisation — may
be the
most insidiously durable stereotype of Guiana. Soothing to postcolonial
Western
guilt, it also makes nice copy for tourist brochures. Today’s visitors
to
Guyana, Suriname, and Guyane pay good dollars or euros to experience
life in an
“authentic” Amerindian or Maroon village, and acquire the tranquil
illuminations that supposedly thrive in a pre-electric world.
In the twenty-first century, no
one dares use a term like “noble savage” without irony, but the concept
of
exotic purity endures. The
Riverbones,
a
recent travel narrative (published in 2008), does its best to resist
easy
stereotypes, but its well-meaning young Canadian author finds himself
“stumbling after Eden in the jungles of Suriname”, as his subtitle has
it.
Struggling with personal angst far in the interior, Andrew Westoll
compares the
pain of separation from his girlfriend with “the monumental struggles
of a
beautiful, bountiful nation.” On the final page he encounters the rare
blue
frog that’s obsessed him for months. “I am holding the quintessential
spirit of
Suriname,” he says, “the soul of the last Eden, in the palm of my hand.”
Who knew paradise was small
enough to grasp?
ii
“How do you make a destination for
others into a home for the
self?”
Mary
Louise
Pratt
(quoting Horacio Quiroga),
Imperial Eyes:
Travel Writing and Transculturation,
2nd
edition (2008)
Every place on earth is haunted by
stereotypes. But some are
more haunted than others, and some places are more tenaciously bound by
the
metaphors and fictions spun around them.
For the better part of five
centuries, the region of South America that we might call the island of
Guiana
has been tethered in the imagination of the West as a geography to be
explored
and exploited, endured and adventured in, but not as a place to truly
make a
home. [4]
The Dutch and the English built plantations and ports in their Guiana
colonies. The French built prisons. Desired raw materials were shipped
out, and
undesirable men shipped in. That societies evolved here — hybrid
communities
where cultural elements from four continents collide and collude — was
an
accident of history.
Now we find ourselves in what we
like to call a postcolonial age, having exchanged flags in a series of
midnight
ceremonies over the past forty years. But capital-I Independence has
not made
us less reliant on global economies, whether of finance, trade, or
ideas. We
depend as much as ever on foreign dollars and attention. And the
world’s regard
still filters through a persistent swaddle of stories we did not tell,
images
we did not make.
The predicament might be
summarised in the question quoted by the literary scholar Mary Louise
Pratt, in
her study of the ways travel literature has portrayed Latin America and
Africa
for European readers. How does “a destination for others” — a place
that has
been described and depicted mostly by others from elsewhere, with their
own
missions and prejudices — a place like Guiana, like Suriname, like the
Caribbean — become “a home for the self”, for the real women and men
who are
born here, raise families, and work to achieve safe and comfortable
lives? This
big question touches on matters of political self-determination,
cultural
self-assertion, personal self-comprehension, and is specially urgent
for those
— our artists, our writers — whose labour it is to imagine new stories
to
replace the old ones that have trapped us.
Artists everywhere grapple with
doubts about relevance and audience and income. But in Suriname, in the
Caribbean, the smallness of our societies intensifies the struggle. The
artist’s options can appear vexing. Fall back on local social networks
offering
patronage and flattery? Adopt the vocabulary and gestures currently
fashionable
in foreign academies, and try to catch the eye of a visiting curator?
Resort to
approved motifs of ancestral heritage and play the role of the
“intuitive” or
“primitive”, hoping to be recognised as authentically exotic?
Initiatives like ArtRoPa,
arranging
working
exchanges between artists in Suriname and the Netherlands —
or like the Wakaman Project,
instigating creative partnerships between
Surinamese artists at home and abroad — or like Paramaribo Span,
building a
platform to share the work of artists in Suriname with audiences
elsewhere —
seem to offer the possibility of stepping past the limits of a small
place, the
chance to infiltrate the wider world with our own metaphors and hopes.
But,
inevitably, old fictions intervene, and artists often find themselves
and their
audiences snarled in preconceptions of what Surinamese (or Caribbean)
art
should look like, what its acceptable subjects might be, how it should
“read”,
what it could mean. [5]
An artist’s job is to create
something meaningful — an object, an experience, a sensation — in the
space
where personal vision and ambition meet opportunity and social
circumstance.
The dimensions of that space are constantly shifting, and one way to
define an
artist’s success is by the range of the creative territory he or she is
able to
inhabit. For artists from parts of the world that have long been
“destinations
for others”, the space of potential action, and the ways their work can
be
received and understood, are bounded by the old imaginary geography. [6] Before
we can cross that boundary — or shift it, or erase it — we must both
see it and
recognise it for what it is: a confining fantasy of the exotic with a
long
history and a heady allure.
Metaphors have alarming
longevity. The New World, five centuries later, is still “new”. To kill
a story
requires a more powerful story, a more resonant fiction. And
re-charting the
domain of our hopes and fears — our creative space, our “home for the
self” —
whether we give that home the name of a nation or a region, Suriname,
Guiana,
the Caribbean — demands immense and sustained feats of imagination. It
demands
that we invent new images and new languages to describe and debate our
own real
world, its scope and its span. It demands powerful and resonant new
dreams. +
Notes
1. For
example: “Seldom has a country been as easily and as
regularly confused with somewhere else: Ghana on the western coast of
Africa,
Guyana east of Venezuela, Guinea next to Senegal, Equatorial Guinea
below
Cameroon….” Alain de Botton on French Guiana, writing in The Faster Times, 13 July, 2009
2. “Eventually
it seemed as if every literate European was
familiar with the gruesome picture....” P.C. Emmer, The Dutch Slave
Trade, 1500–1850 (2006)
3. Some
scholars have also interpreted the apparently
toponymous character of Oroonoko as an allegorical embodiment of Guiana
— the
region southeast of the Orinoco — as a place of natural harmony and
dignity
brutalised by European colonisation.
4. Implicit in
this imaginary is the idea that places like
Guiana — and for that matter the Caribbean — are properly outside the
modern,
outside the mainstream timescale of cultural and political development;
when in
fact, as even the most cursory reflection on history makes clear,
tropical
America has been an essential node of the modern world since at least
1492.
Columbus’s fateful footfall on a beach on an island which he promptly
(and
tellingly) rechristened triggered a sharp acceleration in the gears of
European
globalisation, capitalism, and technological evolution.
5. Of course,
it is not only the fantasies of the foreign
imagination that entangle us. In our recently independent states, the
idea of
“national” culture and identity is a labyrinth of competing ethnic and
class
ideals, jealousies, prejudices, disputes, culpabilities, and claims — a
maze
with no clear centre or route to an exit. The “nation” also confines.
6.
The
boundary has traps on both sides. For foreign artists who try to
engage with Suriname (or the Caribbean), it’s thrillingly easy to fall
back on
old fantasies — of virgin paradise, quest for adventure, last Eden —
and
imagine a place like this as an exotic dream. It is as unsurprising as
it is
galling that a Dutch artist making work inspired by Suriname — or a
British
artist with Trinidad, an American with the Bahamas — will likely find a
readier
market than any Surinamese, Trinidadian, or Bahamian artist ever could
in the
“real” world of metropolitan galleries and collectors. The patterns of
history
repeat: right now in Amsterdam or London or New York, an art dealer or
curator
awaits some expat artist’s exotica with the same relish those old Dutch
merchants felt on acquiring the paintings of Post and Valkenburg.
•••